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Emma Wilby, Cunning Folk and Familiar Spirits: Shamanistic Visionary Traditions in Early Modern British Witchcraft and Magic.(Book review)
- Article from:
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Magic, Ritual, and Witchcraft
- Article date:
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June 22, 2008
- Author:
- Gibson, Marion
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Copyright informationCOPYRIGHT 2008 University of Pennsylvania Press. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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EMMA WILBY, Cunning Folk and Familiar Spirits: Shamanistic Visionary Traditions in Early Modern British Witchcraft and Magic. Brighton, U.K., and Portland, Ore.: Sussex Academic Press, 2005. Pp. xvi + 317.
Emma Wilby's Cunning Folk and Familiar Spirits is a bold, yet careful and intellectually rigorous, attempt to examine a hotly contested area of British history: the epistemological status of the stories of visionary journeys and experiences told by cunning people (practitioners of popular magic) and accused witches during the period of the witchcraft trials of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. As Wilby explains, such stories have often been considered to be the ...